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Europe’s Asian Centuries: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge 1600-1830

Maxine Berg

Keynote Address

The Third European Congress on World and Global History

London School of Economics 14-17 April, 2011

1. From Industrialization to Global History

A. Industrialization

My entry to global history came through a long career in studying aspects of the

Industrial Revolution in Europe. That industrial revolution for me has turned upon

factors connecting production and consumption. I investigated the role of exotic

consumables and luxury goods that impacted on the consuming and working

practices of ordinary households, especially in N. &W. Europe and the Atlantic world.

Caribbean and American sugar and tobacco connected with Asia’s spices, coffee

and tea; colonial groceries were consumed alongside Asia’s manufactured goods,

porcelain, silks and cotton textiles. Consuming exotic commodities from the wider

world became an obsession reaching right through Europe’s social classes.

A wide trading world opened out to bring together those commodities which

by the later eighteenth century were the civilized props of the everyday household in

most parts of Europe. This was a trading world bound together by Indian textiles and

Japanese then Spanish American silver; and Indian textiles in turn provided the

currency for the Africa trade, including the slave trade. This global integration of

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consumer markets and producers predated the classic British technological and

industrial achievements focussed on coal mines, iron foundries and cotton factories.

During the past ten years there has been a new foregrounding of the role of

India and China in emerging European industrialization. Their industrial and

agricultural products fed escalating consumer desires in the West. China and India

were the ‘first industrial regions’ providing manufactured export goods on a mass

scale to markets throughout the world , as they are now doing once again. We are

now living in a new Asian Century. But we must remember a history of Europe’s

earlier Asian centuries of that period between 1600 and 1800 when Europe

discovered and traded in Asian products on a large scale, bringing cotton textiles,

ceramics and tea drinking into the fabric of everyday lives. These centuries have

been revisited by several generations of historians who have recounted experiences

of encounter and possession, and have recast different versions of the ‘rise of the

west’.

What I would like to do here is to look back to Europe’s Asian centuries, not

just as an event of linked consumer cultures, but of industrial production on a mass

scale, providing for huge domestic and global markets. This was first of all an Indian

and Chinese achievement; in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

their industries expanded through labour intensification and reorganization to provide

a large scale export ware sector. Above all this was a manufacturing system adept at

providing the goods that people wanted to buy. Products and quality were as

significant to this trade as were productivity growth. Theirs was the industry which

ultimately stimulated the technological transformation in Europe. European

manufacturers and inventors throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century

tested their patents, projects and products against the great achievements of

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translucent Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles in madder red and indigo dyes, in

glorious prints or in the textures of the finest muslins. This is the story which should,

I want to argue, precede our explanation of European industrialization.

B. Global History

This narrative and analysis of industrialization is part of a recent turning to what we

now call global history. That global history was once a history of globalization,

centred on big themes of politics and economics. But historians have recently

ranged much wider, and global history has brought together historians from many

different trajectories – colonial and imperial history, S. Asian and East Asian and

more recently South American area studies, Ottoman and Islamic world studies, and

historians of cultural and religious encounter and engagement. This approach to

history has challenged the old national histories and area studies as well as

periodizations which have dominated our disciplinary divisions. What is Europe in

the wider space of Eurasia? What is the early modern in a history which

encompasses the Yuan-Ming porcelain trade and Chola and Vijayanagar period

textile travels?

And yet it has been difficult to move beyond the economic and political

frameworks of those grand narratives of domination and resistance centred on

empire building and nation states. Their big questions are very compelling, and the

source of enduring interest: they have focussed on the sources of the great

divergence between West and East, on the historical phases of globalization, and on

the rise and decline of empires. The great divergence which has framed so much of

our recent thinking in global history has yielded large-scale comparative studies on

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differences in resource bases, capital inputs, population and wages or institutional

structures and state building among the great regions of the world. Investigating the

sources of the Great Divergence attracts us because it challenges us to turn our

sights outwards from our own internal histories, to compare the resource base of the

Yangtze Delta to that of Northwest Europe, to compare London wage rates with

those of Beijing. Much data has been collected on these comparisons; the focus has

moved out to include comparisons with India as well as China and Japan, and also

the Ottoman and Spanish Empires. We have learned much. But I think it is time to

shift some of the questions. I would like us to turn to more open-ended questions

over global connections: how did the transmission of material culture and useful

knowledge across regions of the world affect the economic and cultural

developments in any one of these regions? This leads us into narratives of

interaction which could take us deeper into the analysis of imperial domination, but

equally lead us into the connections that created economic development in Europe.

Europe’s Asian Centuries – the Project

To this end I am now embarking on a new project on trading Eurasia. This a large-

scale study of EICs and private trade in the transfer of manufactured goods, their

material culture and useful knowledge from Asia to Europe. The hypothesis behind

the project is that Europe’s pursuit of quality goods turned a pre-modern encounter

with precious and exotic ornament into a modern globally-organized trade in Asian

export ware. Ironically, the result was Europe’s industrialization and China’s and

India’s displacement as the world’s leading manufacturers. (It is of course a further

irony that the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have seen Europe’s loss of

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those manufacturing catalysts of textiles, ceramics and metal goods back to Asia;

but this is another story.)

I want to look in greater depth at those Asian goods which so fascinated

Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The porcelain and textiles

collections of our great museums have been intensively studied by museum curators

and collectors. Their knowledge is prodigious, and their exhibitions convey a history

to a wider public that has only recently reached scholarly history writing. The

artefacts they conserve and display are the visual sources of a wider-world impact

on European material cultures. Trading Eurasia has to be sure been the focus of the

many great studies of Europe’s East India Companies. There have been histories of

the VOC, the EIC, the French East India Companies, the Danish and Swedish

Companies, and the Ostend Company as well as of the Indies projects of other

European powers and the private merchants interspersed among them. But the

histories of these EICs have been hived off into a separate history of colonialism and

empire. There are also large-scale quantitative data bases of trade, but this data has

been aggregated, and the characteristics of the goods traded expunged from the

historical record. How else can an economic historian deal with the hundreds of

varieties of cloth traded?

Yet a comment by a French East India Company servant may better capture

the realities of the Asian trade. ‘All the science of the merchant, he wrote, is

restricted to the knowledge of the different types of these cloth’. (cited in Riello, Part

2, chap. 4, p. 18). It is time that we too enquired into the characteristics and qualities

of the goods brought from Asia and how these were integrated into European

imaginations and everyday life. This is where I think we can take global history in

new directions. We can then look at the impact of the connections in material culture

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and useful knowledge on crucial economic transitions in the west. I am now

focussing together with some postdoctoral fellows and PhD students on the way in

which the companies helped to create a large-scale Asian export-ware sector, one

that fed Europe’s insatiable demand for millions of pieces of textiles and thousands

of tons of porcelain.

First we must remind ourselves of the size of this Asia trade to Europe. Tea,

textiles, porcelain, lacquerware , furnishings, drugs and dyestuffs made for a

systematic global trade carried in quantities which by the later eighteenth century

came to 50,000 tons a year, as estimated by Jan de Vries. This made for just over

one pound of Asian goods per person for a European population of roughly 100

million. If we look to textiles and porcelain alone, we see the prodigious amounts of

these goods reaching Europe from the 17th C. Riello’s recent estimates show 1.3

million pieces of cotton textiles reaching Europe by the late 1680s, and 24.3 million

pieces over the period1665-1799. The British alone imported between 1 and 2

million pieces a year of Chinese porcelain by the early 18th C. The Dutch imported

43 million pieces from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the

18thC.

These were goods which reached surprisingly far down the social classes.

30-50% of English inventories from various parts of the country contained chinaware;

more than 50% of recently-studied Dutch and Southern Netherlandish probate

inventories left porcelain by the 1740s. Other recent studies of the textiles in the

inventories of the Amsterdam Orphanage in the 1740s to 1780s show both rich and

poor buying Asiatic textiles; the clothes marking babies brought to the London

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Foundling hospital in the mid 18thC. included only a few samples of Indian sourced

printed calicoes, but many examples of cruder imitative prints following closely on

Indian designs.

Another important point to remember about the material culture of these

goods is their longevity. They were bequeathed and recycled, distributed through

poorer groups in a second-hand trade, sometimes in damaged or chipped form, so

that they had a wider use and cultural impact than indicated in trade data alone.

The impact of these Asian imports was to stimulate a new industrial response

in Europe – one in which European entrepreneurs adapted Asian design, production

and industrial organization. The result was a process whereby a relatively limited

trade in oriental luxuries was transformed into a much larger trade in Asian export-

ware of high-quality consumer products. Responding to demand from the East India

Companies, Asian manufacturers developed an export-ware sector which would first

enable the Companies to extend their markets in Europe, and then stimulate

European manufacturers to develop their own consumer goods industries.

But how can we study this? Historians in the past debated the extent to which

the early stages of Europe’s industrialization were processes of import substitution.

The concept of import substitution itself derives from models applied by development

economists to less developed economies after the Second World War; these were

advised to promote with high tariff walls industries which would produce goods

similar to those formerly imported. There were parallel theories of export promotion

to describe developments in parts of Asia, especially S. Korea and Taiwan in the

1980s, where specific industries competed with western counterparts. But these

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concepts are too narrow to help us to understand Europe’s remarkable response to

Asia’s manufacturing leadership in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Historians applying such models taken from the twentieth century failed to

make any connection with markets or technologies. They described mercantilist

policies and processes by which a domestic market came to be supplied from within

rather than from the international marketplace. They did not write about the more

positive part played by imports in stimulating a dynamic development of domestic

consumption; that is, the way that imports from outside a region changed consumer

horizons and family behaviour, in short, what Jan de Vries has called an ‘industrious

revolution’. Applying simple models of export promotion has not taken us a great

deal further. Historians who have pursued this line of analysis have simply revived

histories of the Industrial Revolution as imperial domination. They have left

unexplored the stimulation of learning and knowledge offered by global

interconnections; the learning of new skills and understanding materials offered in

the response to imports.

A better model entails two developments. First, there was the accessing of

diverse quality consumer goods from Asia. Cultivation of an export ware sector by

the E. India Companies entailed industrial development in Asia and marketing there

and onwards to Europe which focussed on variety, quality and quantity. Second,

there was a process of imitative invention in Europe to create a consumer goods

sector. This was based in product innovation, new technologies and organization.

The widespread import of Asian goods into Europe from the seventeenth

century onwards came with dense information networks which fostered markets, but

also spurred those involved to envisage changing materials, adapting designs and

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introducing new techniques that would break through traditional processes. Physical

contact with imported objects was vital; European manufacturers came to the East

India Company auctions to touch the cloth, count the threads, and assess the

quality. Europe’s early porcelain manufacturers borrowed princely Chinese porcelain

collections to a similar purpose. Armed with this information, they dissected,

experimented and adapted skills honed to other purposes. Asian goods and their

technologies provided new challenges, perceived at the time to be quite distinct from

those posed by earlier European imports.

Eighteenth-century political economists and manufacturers understood this.

They saw that the impact of Asia was both one of both material culture and useful

knowledge. What Europeans appreciated was the scale and diversity of those Asian

imports. The Asian technologies were based on imitative principles: modularity,

standardization, mechanical replication. Craft skill combined with mass production to

produce diverse and distinctive products. In eighteenth-century terms, exotic

ornament was being turned into ‘modern luxuries’.

A. Global Connections: Material Culture and Useful Knowledge

My focus on imports and an Asian export-ware sector leads to a new interrogation of

connections – connections both in material culture - in the making of commodities –

and in the knowledge of production. This leads us into issues of what Joel Mokyr

has called the ‘industrial enlightenment’. Mokyr made a case that the West

developed a very specific ‘useful knowledge’. This ‘useful knowledge’ was

knowledge of natural phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour; it

encompassed practical and informal knowledge as well as theory and codified formal

knowledge; it included the work of those who collected observations and who

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compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts and manufactures with their

descriptions of industrial skills and crafts.

Mokyr took a firm line that the real divergence between the West and the rest

of the world did not arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a

‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not elsewhere’. That

knowledge revolution was a culture of science, of practice and belief in material

progress. It was pan-European, conveyed by travel and translation, and bridges

were built between intellectuals and producers, between savants and fabricants.

Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen, all believed that this knowledge

revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the world. But in fact, they did not

go far enough – we need to understand that the industrial enlightenment was also

about meeting the challenge of Asia.

The challenge to global historians is to investigate the connections between

knowledge and wealth not just in Europe but between Europe and Asia. How much

was the’ improving culture’ claimed by Mokyr a result of European Enlightenment, or

can we find parallel and alternative knowledge systems in China and India? I

cannot take up this latter question, but what I can do in the remainder of this paper is

to investigate European endeavours to collect not just the commodities, but the

knowledge of manufactures from around to the world. These can be recovered in

travellers’ accounts, the surveys of natural historians, and the investigations made by

merchants and agents of Europe’s East India Companies. Those accounts provide

us with some access to that knowledge of ‘outsiders’, and perceptions at the time of

transfers of skills and knowledge. Through these we can approach the question:

‘how much did Europe learn from Asia?’

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What we find is a political economy addressed to products, their

characteristics and their qualities, to innovation based in artisan skill, and to learning

from China and India. The intellectual framework for this was established by the

analytical political economists of the early and mid eighteenth century. David Hume

put the case with characteristic acuteness. Foreign trade, he argued, preceded the

improvement of home manufactures. Through foreign commerce men become

acquainted with the pleasures of luxury. After this, imitation stimulated domestic

manufactures, which ‘emulate the foreign in their improvements…Their own steel

and iron, in such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and rubies of the

Indies.’ The process, as Hume rendered it, was effectively one of import

substitution, multiplied by imitation.

At a less abstract level, the political economy of products took the form of an

extensive print culture of dictionaries and encyclopedias, itself closely linked to a

network of Societies of Improvement. Among many dictionaries of trade, commerce

and industry was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and

Commerce (1749-1788). Among Europe’s improvement societies we may look for

example at the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce started in 1753.

Postlethwayt set out the purpose of the new edition of his Universal

Dictionary in 1774 to look at the dependence of the prosperity and trade

of this nation on the mechanical and manufactured arts. Government and

the legislature needed to support these so ‘their industrious ingenuity’

may not be surpassed by any rival nation especially France. His

Dictionary would also address ‘the commerce of the Chinese, and the East

Indies, in general; by what means they are carried on. - Of the excessive

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cheapness of their arts, mfrs, and produce; whereby all European nations

are attracted to trade with them, and resort to them for their productions

and mfrs. With pertinent observations to carry on their commerce both in

a private and public way, and best to the advantage of Europe’ (p. v).

The entry on the ‘Mechanical Arts’ focussed on Bengal as a ‘centre for the

mechanic arts and sciences equal to most countries.’ 'The artizans here have

wonderful skill and dexterity: they excel particularly in making linen cloth, which is of

such fineness, that very long and broad pieces of it may easily be drawn through a

small ring…-on the whole, in whatever mechanical or manufactured arts other

nations may excel Great Britain, our artists should be upon the watch, not only to

imitate, but surpass, if possible. Those which are imported, and which they can see,

handle, and minutely examine, they are the most like to imitate or excel…As we

have arrived at a great perfection in the China ware, why may we not in divers other

eastern arts and manufactures?’

Entries on ‘Callicoe’ described a ‘kind of linen manufacture, made of cotton,

chiefly in the East Indies’. It was a great trade in Bengal, and was transported in

‘prodigious quantities in Persia, Turkey, Arabia, Muscovey, and all over Europe…

some of them are painted with flowers of various colours…those made at Seconge

‘grow the fairer, the more you wash them…’

The extended entry on Porcelain – 9 folio pages in a two-volume work based

on Pere d’Entrecolle’s accounts of 1712 provided detailed accounts of the division of

labour and the kilns, and high praise for the quality and price of the ceramics:

'What render the Oriental porcelain so universally estimable is, not only its

general delicacy, but its general greater cheapness compared to that of

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Dresden, or any other nation: [We] will [never] vend so large a quantity as is

done by the Asiatics in general.'

Beside accounts like these there were the projects of the Society of Arts,

Manufactures and Commerce which advertised premiums for priority inventions and

new products. It had sections on Colonies and Trade, on Manufactures as well as

on Chemistry, Dyeing and Mineralogy, quite apart from other sections on Agriculture,

Mechanics, and the Polite Arts. The Premium List for 1763 included an offer of £100

for ‘the greatest Improvement in dying Cotton to answer the Purposes of the Turkey

or India Red…’ That in 1767 offered 20 guineas for ‘the best Specimen of useful

China or Porcelain, consisting of not less than twelve Pieces, made of British

Materials…’ (Society of Arts, Premium List, 1763, p. 27; Premium List, 1767, p. 17)

This political economy of Asian arts in Europe also connected with wider

European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures from around to the

world. Historians of science have demonstrated the great interest at the time in the

crops and plants of the wider world, and they have compiled large histories of the

botanical collectors of the eighteenth century. But what of Asia’s industries – the

resources, technologies, work and skill that produced those oriental luxuries as well

as more quotidian iron and steel, soda and saltpetre?

It was difficult to access that knowledge of manufactures in China and Japan.

India seemed more accessible. This was the period when India was not yet de-

industrialised, and Britain was still in the process of industrialization. During a key

period of 1780s and 1790s India’s cotton industry was producing far and away the

greatest part of the world’s textiles, but Britain’s small industry was mechanizing and

growing rapidly; Britain’s iron industry, transformed by coal-fired smelting met all

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challengers apart from the Swedes; her fine metal manufactures were the wonder of

the rest of Europe. But at this stage nothing was certain – manufacturers, industrial

spies and technological investigators travelled, collected and translated processes

they found across Europe. They also did so in that Asian powerhouse of

manufacture, India, which they could access through the East India Companies and

through Catholic and Protestant missions.

One such example of a local site of knowledge exchange is the Coromandel

coast, and especially the small community of Tharangampadi, then known as

Tranquebar. A number of EIC agents and physicians integrated with the natural

historians who came with missions ; Jesuit and Catholic missionaries in the French

factories, then Pietist, Baptist, and Moravian missionaries at the Danish colonies of

Serampore in Bengal and of Tranquebar learned languages – Sanskrit and Persian,

but also vernacular languages: in South India – Tamil, Telegu, Telinga, Malayan.

The French accounts of calico printing on the Coromandel coast are now well-

known. Father Coeurdoux after questioned a number of calico painters, and hoped

his account would assist in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe. (P&P. 114 MB )

Jean Rhyner, the Basle chemist drew on these and other French accounts in 1766,

but concluded ‘even granted all things equaled we could never adopt their methods,

for we lack skilled craftsmen and could not keep the maintenance costs so low.’( see

P&P piece – p. 115).

Another to be fascinated with Indian technologies and industries was

Benjamin Heyne,a German chemist and mineralogist from the Moravian mission in

Tranquebar and later the EIC pepper plantation at Samulcotah. In the 1780s and

1790s Heyne displayed an intense curiosity in dyeing techniques, in the extraction

processes of the fabled diamond mines of South India, in the skilled labour that

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produced fine Indian iron and steel or wootz [? Explain], and a range of other useful

industries from copper to saltpetre, soda and glass manufacture. Heyne was one of

a remarkable group of missionaries and natural historians at the Danish factory in

Tranquebar, a group now of great interest to historians of science and medicine

[including Sujit Sivasundaram, Niklas Jensen and Pratik Chakrabarti]. The Moravian

mission there included Johann Koenig who had arrived in 1768 as a surgeon, and

who initiated those already there in Linnaean methodology, along with John Peter

Rottler, Johann Gottfried Klein, and Christoph John, another avid natural historian,

the leader of the mission during Heyne’s time there, and his mentor.

There were close networks among the physicians and natural historians

centred around the botanical gardens – John kept up a close correspondence with

William Roxburgh and James Anderson. He traded books and seeds for the

delightful printed calicoes he and his wife craved; ‘Mrs. John and I are most

anxiously waiting for the kindly promised long cloth & chintz & if we don’t get them

soon, we must return to the primitive state of Adam & Eve.’ (Letter to Roxburgh,

Sept. 29, 1789)

Heyne’s accounts of his industrial journeys were sent to Christoph John at the

Tranquebar mission as he wrote them, then circulated onward to William Roxburgh

in the early to mid 1790s. A number of them were revised and entered into Reports

to the Board of Control, and several were further revised, and finally appeared as

chapters in his Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India; with Journals of Several

Tours through Various Parts of the Peninsula: also an Account of Sumatra in a

Series of Letters (London, Robert Baldwin, Paternoster-Row, 1814).

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Heyne’s accounts suggest that there are a number of issues of which we

need to take account if we are to gauge the significance of this form of global ‘useful

knowledge’

1. Difficulties of travel

2. Secrecy and access to knowledge

3. Descriptions of labour and craft, especially in diamond mines, textile

dyeing processes, iron manufacture and saltpetre production.

4. Scientific theory and industrial processes

5. Prospects of development

Difficulties of Travel:

He described journeys where ‘my suite consisted of near forty persons: twelve

palankeen boys for myself, a flambeau bearer); carriers for baggage, books and

provisions, servants, a draughtsman and two plant collectors and a small guard of

armed men is…necessary as a protection from robbers and tigers…People in

England have no conception of the labour and expense which it costs to obtain a box

of insects or plants…’(Tracts, p. 248)

Secrecy

He encountered hostility and efforts to block his investigations in the copper mines,

at areas of soda and saltpetre production, and in the diamond mines; he admired ‘

the extraordinary skill of the People in the discovery of Diamond mines’…the

knowledge of which, they have always been very tenacious in keeping to themselves

as much as possible.’ (Board of Control F/4/1, p. 135)

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Heyne visited diamond mines and iron works, textile centres and areas

manufacturing saltpetre and soda. The fabled diamond mines of Golconda had long

declined by 1790, but Heyne explored those of Mellavilly, south west of Ellore. He

provided detailed accounts of the diamond beds, how they were worked, and the

division of labour. (MsEur.D809 – Report of an Excursion to the Diamond Mines at

Mallavilly and Iron Works at Ramanakapellah near Ellore, p. 11; Tracts, 101)

Heyne went on to another of India’s recognized industries, its iron manufacture. He

found groups of poor iron smelterers of the Northern Circars, as well as works in

several other areas. A group of 8 or 9, miners, smelters, wood cutters and labourers

could produce ‘considerable iron…’the finest in every respect for tools, razors etc…

the demand for it is great.’(Tracts, p. 218). He likewise praised India’s fine steel or

wootz, long used in weapons manufacture.

Science

Heyne attempted where possible to connect his formal scientific knowledge to the

processes he witnessed. He discussed Boyle’s theories on gems (Eur809, Report on

Diamond Mines of Mallavilly… p. 18), and assayed ores. (Heynes, Cursory

Observations made on a Tour from the Banks of the Kistna to Timmericatah,Ms.Eur

D809)

Prospects for Development

Heyne concluded that diamond mining and processing, though much reduced from

its former times, was still viable. He admired the quality of iron produced by artisan

smelters, but regretted the lack of coal, and hence the cast iron then leading the

British iron industry. Indian steel, soon to be much investigated by the Royal Society,

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was however, was another matter. Heyne thought there was much to be gained in

promoting the manufacture, for English steel ‘is worse in quality than it was some

thirty or forty years ago’. (Tracts, p. 364)

This artisanal smelting declined with entry of Br. & Swedish iron into India in the

19thC. Larger scale works including EIC backed ironworks such as Porto Novo in

the early nineteenth century were not cost effective, and India’s iron industry went

the way of so many other industries.

Purpose of the Surveys:

Heyne’s industrial surveys were made in the 1780s and 1790s, some probably

during the period when he was at the Tranquebar mission, and others later while he

was Acting Botanist at Samulcotah. He set an agenda coinciding with that

enlightenment search for ‘useful knowledge’ connecting with what Mokyr has called

the ‘industrial enlightenment. Heyne admired resources, skills and above all quality

products. His arduous journeys and painstaking analysis of Indian products and how

they were made provided connections between European investigators and

indigenous producers, and connections in material culture and useful knowledge

between Asia and Europe.

Conclusion:

A small place in Southern Indian and a German Moravian industrial traveller lead us

back to Europe’s Asian Centuries. They reveal the interlinking of Asia’s and

Europe’s manufacturing economies where the demands of an export ware sector fed

into those of Europe’s industrialization. Delivering designs to meet European tastes,

delivering high volumes and responding to new fashion, the key constraint was

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meeting demands for quality, reliability and standards. These were issues about

products that any competing European industrial system would have to meet. They

created a highly-charged competitive atmosphere of trade, product development and

invention. While Benjamin Heyne was testing the quality of S. Indian iron and

calculating the profitability of a trade in Indian saltpetre, Robert Peel and Samuel

Oldknow were at the EIC auctions in London, as was Christophe-Philippe

Oberkampf in Lorient, testing their own new-invented European cotton products and

prints against the quality and variety of recently arrived shipments from India.

The global connection my project and wider work pursues is that mercantile trade to

China and India underpinned the development of industrious and industrial

revolutions in Europe.

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